August 2, 2010 Issue

In “The Scales Fall” in this week’s issue, Elizabeth Kolbert advances an argument in the guise of a book review. She runs through a pile of books about our overfished oceans, picking corroborative quotations wherever she finds them for her basic contention that we have harvested wild fish “to the edge of extinction,” yet we do not have the will to stop and do something about it. It’s a damn good argument, and her Exhibit A – the Atlantic bluefin tuna – powerfully illustrates her case. My complaint doesn't have anything to do with her argument; I find her point completely irrefutable. My complaint, such as it is, is with respect to the weakness of her piece as a book review. It’s in the “Books” section of the magazine, and so it should be first and foremost about books. It seems to me that in “The Scales Fall,” Kolbert has too many books under consideration for such a brief review to be able to do justice to any one of them. At least five books are mentioned in her piece. There isn’t an extended quote from any of them. One of the books – Paul Greenberg’s recently published “Four Fish” – I know something about. I read Sam Sifton’s excellent review of it in The New York Times Sunday Book Review (July 29, 2010). Among other things, Sifton says, “Combining on-the-ground and on-the-ocean reporting from the Yukon to Greece, from the waters of Long Island Sound to the Mekong Delta, along with accounts of some stirring fishing trips, Greenberg makes a powerful argument: We must, moving forward, manage our oceans so that the fish we eat can exist both in aquacultural settings and within the ecosystems of wild oceans.” This sounds like the kind of book I like, particularly with regard to the “accounts of some stirring fishing trips.” You’d never know “Four Fish” had this kind of content from the couple of references Kolbert makes to it. I suppose Kolbert would reply that I’m part of the problem if all I want to do is read about fishing stories, because the whole point of her piece is that the time may not be too far off when there will be no fish to fish. Nevertheless, “Four Fish” is a book I intend to acquire and read sometime soon. If Kolbert’s review was the only one I had to go by, I probably would’ve missed it.